Fetal Sense of Touch: What Your Baby Can Feel in Utero

Updated: October 13, 2016

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When he’s curled up inside the womb, your baby doesn’t have much exploring to do. But even in this protected world, a fetus is actively developing a sense of touch that will help him to explore and learn from the moment he’s born.

Before your baby can smell, taste, see or hear, he’s already developed another sense: touch. You might not think about touch as often as the other senses, but it’s key to survival: Animals and people alike instinctively pull away from things that feel uncomfortable, cold or sharp, and huddle closer to objects (like mom!) that feel soft and warm. Plus the sense of touch is one of baby’s earliest tools to learn about the world around him — which is why it’s so important for a baby’s sense of touch to be fully developed by the time he’s born.

What is Touch?

For your baby to be able to feel things around him — the fuzziness of the carpet during tummy time, the warmth of your body or the water swirling around him during his first bath — he needs what’s known as a somatosensory system. This is essentially just a network of touch receptors spread all over the body that connect back to the brain through nerve cells. Each receptor is uniquely tuned to sense one component of touch (temperature, pressure or pain, for instance). In an adult, these receptors are found in just about every area of your body — just under the skin of your fingers (that’s how you feel things you touch), throughout your abdomen (so you can feel a stomachache), and in your lips and tongue (to help you know what you’re eating).

Touch: The First Sense to Develop

Parts of the somatosensory system start to develop only a few weeks after conception. By week 8 of pregnancy, your baby has developed touch receptors in his face — mostly on his lips and nose — which are connected to his growing brain. If you could gently brush your baby’s face with a feather, he would respond with a set of instinctive movements — looking toward the stimulus and lifting his arms. Over the next few months, touch receptors start to form in other places throughout your baby’s body —his genitals, palms and the soles of his feet by week 12, and the full abdomen by week 17. By week 32, every part of a fetus has gained a sense of touch that’s sensitive enough to feel a single hair brushing across the body.

The development of the sense of touch isn’t just a consequence of a maturing brain. It turns out that by sensing stimuli in the womb (i.e., as a baby starts to feel the amniotic fluid around him), the somatosensory receptors help to develop his whole nervous system— including his brain, spinal cord and even the system that controls his digestive system.

When a Fetus Can Feel Pain

Even when a fetus can sense a light touch, it still doesn’t feel pain the way you do. That requires not only touch receptors, but signaling molecules and pathways in the brain that can process a pain signal. Researchers using brain scanning methods on unborn babies think that fetuses probably feel pain around the same time that the somatosensory system finishes its development — around week 29 or week 30 of pregnancy. Before that, a fetus reacts to touch with a change in heart rate or hormone levels, but the message doesn’t reach the pain center of the brain.

Acclimating to Life After Birth

What your baby hears and the patterns of light and dark he sees while still in your womb help him get used to the stimuli he’ll experience outside. But this isn’t the case for his sense of touch — a fetus can’t feel anything in the outside world before birth! So instead of helping him to acclimate to life after birth, fetal touch is mostly important for mediating reflexes. The ability to feel amniotic fluid in his throat, for example, helps a baby learn how to swallow in utero. In those first moments after birth, his sense of touch will help him to cough (a reaction to feeling liquid in his throat), cry (in response to the sudden change in his surroundings) and cuddle against you.

From the moment your baby enters the world, his sense of touch will become essential to interacting with the world around him. Feeling your skin instinctively helps your newborn to relax and create a strong attachment to you. As he grows, your baby will feel objects around him and the pressure of the floor beneath him to begin rolling and moving. Researchers have discovered that the sense of touch even plays a role in language: Pointing and touching words while looking at books helps your baby to recognize words faster. So don’t hesitate to let those sticky little fingers explore the world around them!

From the What to Expect editorial team and Heidi Murkoff, author of What to Expect When You're Expecting. Health information on this site is based on peer-reviewed medical journals and highly respected health organizations and institutions including ACOG (American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists), CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) and AAP (American Academy of Pediatrics), as well as the What to Expect books by Heidi Murkoff.